I've been looking at getting a new server to serve as a virtual host for a migration to vSphere Essentials. I'm debating whether I should go with the R510 or the new 12G R720. I figure I can get them around the same price with the two big differences being: R510, I would go with dual X5650s and 6 15k SAS drives. R720, I'd be looking at dual E5-2630s and 6 10k SAS drives. Decisions, decisions.

Both give me some room for expansion with the drives if I need more disk performance. I think the R720 has more room to expand RAM. I'm not really sure how the E5-2630 procs stack up to the X5650s. I've tried search for benchmarks, but have only found reviews for the much higher end E5 Xeons which are a little out of my price league.

Server will start out hosting only 4 or 5 VMs, including a SQL server, RDS server, and web server. The specs are a little overkill for the workload now, but I want room to breath if I add more VMs down the road.

Any thoughts? Anyone using the new 12G servers from Dell? Any comparision between the procs in question that you'd like to share?

Good question. I'd like to hear some thoughts as well. I'm looking to buy a new 2U server to run Hyper-V on and we have 4 older Win2k3 App servers we want to virtualize on them (plus I want to move my Spiceworks install on it as well).

Would be interested in reading the thoughts on specs for Dell 2U boxes to do virtualization of 4 to 6 machines on.

I'm in the final ordering process of getting (3) R620's with dual E5-2640 processors and 64GB of Ram. Just the difference in the newest generation of processors was enough for me to look at the R620 instead of the R610. I got quotes on both, but the difference was only about 1-2k between the models and you get the new IDRAC and some other stuff.

I can't really speak to storage though because these will be running VM's from a SAN. They will be running the VMWare stuff off of dual 1gb flash drives in a Raid1 config. I don't think I could do that with the R610 either.

First, profile your existing environment and see what you actually need to meet your current requirements. Do you need 15K drives? Do you need the CPU power? Do you need to be able to scale to 25+2 hot swap SFF (R720xd)?

After you know what you're trying to do, the configurations follow. Maybe you're looking to add CPU heavy ERP/DB apps. You'll probably need more CPU and disk I/O scalability which would point to the R720xd. But maybe not that much, would me the regular R720. Etc.

If the cost is trivially different, I'd go for the 25 SFF drives R720xd with 10K drives. Upgrading drives is easy. 11G->12G is forklift.

1st Post

I own both servers, and I just purchased two R720s with dual-socket 6-core processors, 48GB of RAM, and 6x1TB near-line SAS drives - they're running Win2K8 R2 Datacenter edition.

The 720s blow my other servers out of the water hands down. They're fast - 2K8 R2 boots in under a minute.

I think we ended up paying about $7k per server - and it was only about a $2k difference between the 710 and the 720. For the extra $2k, the newer processor architecture and all the other bells and whistles was worth it in my opinion - we even added the premium level extended warranty (I think Dell calls it ProSupport).

What had me leaning towards the 510 was I could fit in 15k 450GB drives under my budget. If I spec out 10k 300GB drives, so that the number of IOPS and total capacity is relatively close to the number of 15k drives I was looking at, are there any other disadvantages to going from 15k to 10k drives?

I can't speak for the 720, but I recently added a 12 disk 510 with nearline sas and it really is a surprising box. It is being used a storage unit in Vmware and its got a dozen vms and it doesn't even break a sweat. No vms like what you are looking to host, but with the right disks I doubt you'll be disappointed.

I see the E5 Xeons are starting to show up on CPUBenchmark. I've actually started looking at the E5-2620 which is a sub-$500 chip and 2GHz. If CPUBenchmark is correct it is actually faster than the X5650 which still costs ~$1k. I wish I could find a more thorough review of that specific chip, but all the professional reviews compare the higher end E5s which are out of my price range.